No Strings Attached. Space Theatre. 3 Jul 2019
With one of the most interesting titles in showbiz, Alirio Zavarce’s production for No Strings Attached gently raised the roof with its Australian premiere performance at the Space Theatre.
This disability-theatre show lines up six performers with a history of memory issues under the direction of devisor and dramaturg, Zavarce, to present separately and together accounts of the frustrations and ensuing humour of diverse disabilities.
In a work about problem memory, the fluency and proficiency with often challenging sets of lines are both triumphant and ironic. The cast seems word-perfect albeit that Zavarce warns the audience that it may not remember things and, anyway, who does remember things and isn’t it strange how remembered things can change? Thus, in essence, this theatrical piece turns out to be a wonderfully complex philosophical exercise to which absolutely everyone can relate. It also is explanatory of various aspects of memory damage, from stroke to trauma. The protagonists tell things their way.
For Adelaide’s theatre community, the return to the stage of actress Michaela Cantwell to tell her story is a sensational highlight. Cantwell was a golden and beloved talent on the Australian stage before a catastrophic stroke forced her to re-learn even the most basic things in life. Here, under the tender directorship of Zavarce, she tells simply and powerfully the story of that shocking disconnection and the process of retraining her body to the most fundamental obedience. There is no self-pity in this tale, just a wise sense of fatalism. She does not know her future but it will be great, she avows. Everyone cheers because already it is great. She is here onstage again and if there is one thing adversity has not stolen from her, it is that magic thing called “stage presence”.
Kathryn Hall is an old hand with No Strings, which company is now 25 years old. She's an infectiously bubbly performer and as a primary-memory tale, she tells of the joy of cooking stuffed peppers because they remind her of her father. She also reminds the audience about the importance of noting the numbers of the bus on which one rides. Wrong number can take one anywhere. She knows.
But it is Kym Mackenzie who has the bus memories wrapped up with bus route numbers and fares and times. As he tells his public transport tale, the numbers mount up as projections on the sliding panels behind him until he is standing in front of a veritable crowd of numerals. This device of flowing memory projections on panels and backdrop big screen is fundamental to the show’s design. The No Strings tech team, affectionately known as the “creatives”, has engendered further life and zest to the show with this artful lighting, sound and image.
Cassie Litchfield’s profile presentation is heartbreaking. Standing in front of these projection panels, she shares childhood happy snaps, warm and fuzzy memories of loving days with her father, before mental illness tore their world apart and left her childhood scarred with pain.
Duncan Luke completes the cast with his account of things remembered and forgotten. He’s one for losing things: cigarettes, the remote, even his mother. His list is long and droll.
Zavarce binds together the facets of the show in a heartfelt, deeply touching existential reflection. Memory is common to us all. It is each one of us, flawed and fabulous. Everyone forgets, some more than others. Some through accident and illness. Some forget their own identity. What we must do, says Zavarce, is make sure not only to remember each other, but to remember for each other whenever we can.
He brings up the house lights so the cast and audience can look each other in the eye, imprint the experience on their memories, and share a meaningful moment.
He philosophises about the pain and beauty of memory, the associations which engender memories, the cruelties of life, and the importance of finding and offering understanding, patience and solace. It is altogether beautiful and profound, in a very significant night of theatre from an exceptional company.
Samela Harris
When: 3 to 6 Jul
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Festival Theatre. 29 Jun
It is hard to dislike Mormons.
Of all the religious, they seem the most innocent and inoffensive. I love the way they help each other. I love their fascination with genealogy and spectacular architecture and now I love the way in which they have accepted one of the most comprehensive all-out Mickey-takes in history.
The Mormon leap of faith involves belief that an American prophet named Joseph Smith dug up a section of the bible in the USA and then hid it again while rallying a massive following of missionaries, all of whom were and are devoted to spreading the word of his all-American biblical history, beginning in 1823.
If people can believe this, they can believe anything.
This is pretty much the confronting message of this musical which now has been packing out theatres around the world for decades. It is written by South Park satirists Matt Stone and Trey Parker with Bobby Lopez and between them, they know just how to tap the cultural funny-bone and push the boundaries of bad taste and monstrous vernacular.
In short, they have concocted a victoriously vulgar musical about human gullibility. Not only but also, they have packed it full of bright, bubbly, foot-tapping Broadway tunes, great big catchy songs, and fabulously choreographed dances.
Nothing beats a talented chorus line of white-shirted blokes all teeth and tap shoes.
The plot follows a couple of newly-ordained missionaries dispatched to spread the word in Uganda where vicious warlords have well and truly subjugated a hapless AIDS-ravaged community. Elder Price is smug and ambitious while his mission mate, Elder Cunningham, is something of the classic loser. Blake Bowden and Nyk Bielak carry these lead roles, rich in voice and comic nuance.
The dogged ingenuousness of the missionaries meets with the incredulity of the villagers, everyone believing one risible superstition or another. A beautiful villager called Nabulungi, exquisitely sung by Tigist Strode, tries to breach the cultural chasm. There’s some juggling of values, a personality clash between the Elders, and a torrent of socio-sexual absurdities and crossed wires all around. Throw in Star Wars, donuts, devils, and The Lion King for good measure.
All of the above is adorned and elucidated by darned good Broadway musical numbers.
And now we know why The Book of Mormon has become an enduring hit.
Rounds of applause!
Samela Harris
When: 29 Jun to 18 Jul
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Scuti Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 21 Jun 2019
English writer and playwright Philip Ridley’s (born 1964) work has been compared for its similarity to the five only plays of English playwright Sarah Kane (1971-99). They both delve with unflinching ferocity into love, sexual desire, violence and metaphors of violence in conveying the wonder and meaning of love and in exploring the limits to sex and intimacy. Tender Napalm from 2011 is Ridley’s eighth adult play and twenty years after his first (the “adult” bit is required because he is also a prolific writer of children’s theatre – maybe they’re not as scary).
The oxymoron ‘tender napalm’ signs the confusion that often accompanies ardent desire, and also the metaphoric weaponry used in this play. Ridley begins near the end of his dramatic arc with a young man and woman (we learn they are 19 and 18 years of age). They are ardently coupled, and early in the piece, the man describes a mind-blowing orgasm during coitus. A grenade exploding in the woman’s love canal was conveyed as carnage and not ecstasy, and comes across with the vulgarity of a terrorist attack. While Mark Healy channels considerable and frightening energy into descriptions of fantasy adventures, and Carol Lawton jousts equally with Healy on matters of family and the past with shouty angst, Lawton and Healy – and director Rachael Williams - struggle to convey the subtext of compulsive desire, seduction and sensuality. Williams focuses more on conflict and imagery than on the sex addiction that keeps this couple together.
It’s a difficult play and the accomplishment of some tender napalm is probably why the director of the world premiere production, David Mercatali, won a couple of awards for his trouble. Ridley’s epilogue is actually the prologue where we witness the first meeting of man and woman who swoon with love at first site. It is in these scenes where Williams has the man and woman’s humanities emerge to the fore as they are not engulfed by enigmatic verbal imagery of exploding grenades, tsunamis and fields of dead monkeys; and the acting sparkles here.
Rachael Williams also designed an elaborate and striking set – a backdrop of household furniture and goods piled perhaps by a tsunami. Man and woman are shipwrecked and isolated and self-absorbed. The set was so awesome that it pulled attention from the players and they barely related to it. Moses Monro is an accomplished modern musician and contributed a magnificent, movie-like score which he controls live with every performance. Bravo!
If only the desire and sexual neediness seen at the end underscored.
David Grybowski
When: 19 to 29 Jun
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 20 Jun 2019
If one thought the days were over when wonderful eastern-states talents deigned to come to Adelaide to tell us what a crap backwater the place is, one may think again. They’re here. Brilliant satirists, “Australia’s best comedians”. Actually here in this comatose dead end of nowhere. To tell us about us.
They have described their “panel” show as “so biting it was like Q&A on crack”. Wow.
It is masterminded by one Dan Ilic who whips the audience up to laugh at his three introductory “jokes”. He then laughs like a drain through the rest of the show to demonstrate how incredibly funny the others are. It is a long hour.
Oddly, they are technically not all out of towners at all. Some are locals with high cringe factor. They think it's hilarious that Adelaide spends so much money on sand reclamation for the beaches and, did we know that Semaphore beach is just too far to walk to the water? Hilarious.
Fact. No one comes to Adelaide. The only reason is the ‘earthy’ wine and since we export it interstate, there is no reason to come. Hahaha.
Luckily, there were a couple of tables of guffawing anti-Adelaiders out there in the darkness to save the performers realising that this was a show dying on its chic feet of eastern podcasting.
They had some really sophisticated takes on climate change. The return of retro diseases, for instance. They will knock out the elderly and everyone can inherit houses. Oh and what a hoot. Researchers say that unimaginable lethal pathogens may be on the rise. Researchers? Who would believe that? Hilarious. The panel members each had a chance to stand up and give a speech. Isn’t Corey Bernadi awful? LOL. The F35 fighter plane is the Collins craft submarine of the air. ROFL
There was the deadpan former nurse whose humour lies in her indifference to everything. Planet is dying? Yawn. Hahaha. There was a leftie who chorused interminably the political discovery that one should "always back the horse called self-interest". Poor thing kept on and on referring to the Sunrise TV show and wondering why the audience was not getting the references. Wrong demographic, mate.
In a burst of research, one of them googled "Adelaide and actors" and discovered that Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Rush once came here. That’s the Festival city’s arts history.
Some earnest references to World Refugee Day and a barely audible Skype interview with someone on Manus Island. We hate refugees says our inspired host. They are high achievers. hahaha
There was a ray of light on the show. Bridie Connell and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd, Aria award winning comedy song writers, sang some really pithy, edgy and relevant satirical songs. Actual satire. Funny. They saved the day.
Of course, their secondary brief was to ask the audience for things Adelaide hates about Adelaide for a song they would write backstage while the audience was being insulted by the panel. Apparently we don’t like tea bags, incest, churches or supermarkets not opening at Easter. They sang a decent little mashup song to that end.
It has been a big, beautiful, interesting Cabaret Festival and one realises that not everything can hit the mark. This was the show to prove the ‘you-can’t-win-‘em-all’ point.
A rational drear.
Look out Hobart. They warn the have even more disdains to throw your way if you’re ever silly enough to invite them. Can you throw a MOFO dark enough for their insolence, do you think?
Samela Harris
When: 20 to 21 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 20 June 2019
Improv is alive and well. Devilishly so. There are few things quite as funny as out-of-control comedy in the hands of expert exponents.
Seriously, the audience could laugh no more. The only flaw to this outlandish mayhem was the cast’s general insistence on locating the audience members who may or may not have suggested song titles for the show.
The improv performers choose from said suggestions placed in a bucket on the stage whence they have to contrive a musical number featured from a fictional on-the-spot Broadway musical. They perform under pseudonyms and have to abide by stringent, albeit confounding, improv rules. This show harks back to the glorious heydays of theatre sports, reviving the arts with absolute expertise, imagination and, that invaluable facet, sophisticated terms of reference and advanced theatre skills.
The audience gets to vote on the best insane confection. And then a full winning musical is performed by the raggle-taggle song and dance improv stars on stage.
The production rests on host Russell Fletcher, weaving the acts together and keeping track of the often convoluted machinations of John Thorn, the world’s most accommodating and infinitely versatile musical accompanist. And thus on Thursday night did the audience experience a murder musical called Cold Case in which bodies were stashed in showroom refrigerators. The big song was called Chill Out it’s just Murder. Then there was My Wintergarten, a Brechtian saga of the country girl with big hopes in 1950s Berlin. There was a show called Does That Equate? Nah. And a gorgeous song called Fruit and Freckles. There was comic shtick of invisible halls and doors, songs which did or didn’t rhyme and gloriously over-the-top cornball characterisations. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense in the re-telling. You have to be there. And it is a thing of boundless, rib-aching joy to be there.
This is classic theatre fun and games which has been part of the performance training and background of Cabaret Festival director Julia Zemiro - which is how it comes to feature for the first time on a CabFest program. She has brought us the top improv team in the country, maybe the world. And, to boot, she stars in the line-up, here as Gretel from Bornhoffer singing the not-hit song What can I buy with three dollars? and giving Adelaide another taste of just who she is. A bloody funny talented star! More. More.
Samela Harris
When: 19 to 22 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed